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Prints of The Week…23 Jan 2015

Good morning everyone and happy Friday! In this week’s design picks I have ran across two Instructable designs and one from Thingiverse. There is not a particular theme this week, however, I just thought these designs were either interesting or would be useful for you.

The first design is from Thingiverse and took me back to my childhood when I built the Visible V8 Engine plastic model. I kept that model until I was almost 40 years old! The Thingiverse design is the Toyota 4 Cylinder Engine, unfortunately it is not visible, but it will still make a great project for the kids and help them understand how a motor works and is put together. If you decide you like the design, please leave positive feedback. This was not an easy undertaking.

The next curious design is an Instructable, 3D Mirror Escape, and will use your painting skills as well as your creative imagination. I like this design because you can surely put on your thinking caps and find other designs that could easily be made into a similar diorama. If you are unfamiliar with the Instructable website, make sure to look around. They have many projects for 3D printers as well as other none printing projects and most have detailed instruction on how to complete the project.

The last Instructable design, Designing a 3D printed beaded ball chain drive pulley for Stepper Motor NEMA 17 on Tinkercad, was chosen because it is a stepping stone to creating other designs. It steps you through how to create a beaded pulley for any project that you might decide to build later as well as points you to the most simple and useful design software on the internet, Tinkercad. I prefer to use Autodesk123D Design to make most of my designs, but I still use Tinkercad on many projects because it can do things that more complicated software cannot. For example, you can upload a .stl file to Tinkercad and work on it. That feature is not fully available in Autodesk123D Design.

Well, that brings us to the end of this article. I hope I have given you something of usefulness to keep you busy until next week! Happy printing!!